Reviews: nonfiction
Play it Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music, ed. George Plasketes: This collection suffers a bit from the “dancing about architecture” problem, especially in the beginning and ending essays. But there were some interesting bits about the ways covers transform, or don’t transform, the songs (that is, the performances of the songs that came first-I liked the point made by Deena Weinstein that one can only have a “cover” when one’s reference point is the sound recording rather than the musical work, because every performance of a musical work is just that; we don’t think of orchestras covering Beethoven’s Fifth).
Susan Burgess, The Founding Fathers, Pop Culture, and Constitutional Law: Who’s Your Daddy?: This short but padded book is a bit of a mess. Purporting to read different constitutional theorists through the lens of popular culture (as authors of romance, comedy, and tragedy respectively), compare Bush v. Gore to a coming out story where the Justices admit that they’re really (gasp) political, and read Lawrence v. Texas through the lens of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, the book neither convinced me as constitutional analysis nor taught me anything interesting with the comparisons, despite their surface appeal.
Jon Krakauer, Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman: I realized while reading this book that I read all those other behavioral economics books to give myself some sense of control in this incredibly screwed-up world. Krakauer here tells the personal story of Pat Tillman, a football player with an active intellectual/moral life recorded in his journals, who decided to enlist in the Army after 9/11. Though he hated the separation from his wife, and thought the war in Iraq was a terrible mistake, he believed that he’d done the right thing; when he was killed by “friendly fire” or fratricide in Afghanistan, the Army immediately began a coverup that stretched far up the chain of command. His memory was badly abused by the Bush administration and only the perserverance of his family revealed the facts-long after it had been widely reported that he was killed by hostiles in an ambush. Krakauer intertwines Tillman’s biography with some history of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, emphasizing how we have repeatedly misconstrued, mismanaged, and otherwise screwed up our policies in the region. It’s a profoundly depressing story, top to bottom, and Krakauer argues that Tillman’s death was the kind of thing that is (1) inevitable in war, which we need to remember, and (2) even more likely when we are in wars that are themselves confusing, with objectives not tied to any reality (Tillman died because, against the advice of everyone actually in the area, HQ ordered his platoon to split up and proceed during the day in an exposed fashion, which itself was only considered necessary because-due to the war in Iraq-there weren’t enough helicopters to come take a disabled vehicle out of the area. It was a mess from top to bottom.)
Chuck Tryon, Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence: Covers a variety of developments, from new methods of financing films to the effect of digital projection on cinemas (it’s expensive to switch from physical reels, even if it may save money in the long run) and the impact of new dissemination models like Netflix on cinema attendance, and then on to the role of film blogs and film remixes in constituting a film-going and -understanding public. Interesting to see these things taken together, since they’re usually considered separately, but people fond of vidding might need to take a few deep breaths while reading that last chapter on remix. (
cesperanza, I was thinking of sending a few pages to you just to watch you react!) Tryon has read Henry Jenkins, but took from him the idea that vidding is about “tributes” to the original, and he uses trailer mashups and film surveys (like the one where different movies count from 1 to 100) to survey the remix genre. While he takes time to note that somehow in the new developments in creating and financing film it’s the young white guys who get celebrated, and even mentions the gender implications of taking Brokeback Mountain mashup trailers as a focus of one’s analysis of remix culture, he then … continues to focus on Brokeback Mountain mashup trailers, while not spending any time explaining what gets left out. Tryon might point out that his interest is in movies, not television, which is somewhat fair (except … Vogue! The Mountain! Handlebars! Beethoven’s Fifth Gold Digger!). But I was naturally drawn to the question of why he picked movies as compared to other forms of audiovisual production, which was not answered in the book.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Susan Burgess, The Founding Fathers, Pop Culture, and Constitutional Law: Who’s Your Daddy?: This short but padded book is a bit of a mess. Purporting to read different constitutional theorists through the lens of popular culture (as authors of romance, comedy, and tragedy respectively), compare Bush v. Gore to a coming out story where the Justices admit that they’re really (gasp) political, and read Lawrence v. Texas through the lens of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, the book neither convinced me as constitutional analysis nor taught me anything interesting with the comparisons, despite their surface appeal.
Jon Krakauer, Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman: I realized while reading this book that I read all those other behavioral economics books to give myself some sense of control in this incredibly screwed-up world. Krakauer here tells the personal story of Pat Tillman, a football player with an active intellectual/moral life recorded in his journals, who decided to enlist in the Army after 9/11. Though he hated the separation from his wife, and thought the war in Iraq was a terrible mistake, he believed that he’d done the right thing; when he was killed by “friendly fire” or fratricide in Afghanistan, the Army immediately began a coverup that stretched far up the chain of command. His memory was badly abused by the Bush administration and only the perserverance of his family revealed the facts-long after it had been widely reported that he was killed by hostiles in an ambush. Krakauer intertwines Tillman’s biography with some history of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, emphasizing how we have repeatedly misconstrued, mismanaged, and otherwise screwed up our policies in the region. It’s a profoundly depressing story, top to bottom, and Krakauer argues that Tillman’s death was the kind of thing that is (1) inevitable in war, which we need to remember, and (2) even more likely when we are in wars that are themselves confusing, with objectives not tied to any reality (Tillman died because, against the advice of everyone actually in the area, HQ ordered his platoon to split up and proceed during the day in an exposed fashion, which itself was only considered necessary because-due to the war in Iraq-there weren’t enough helicopters to come take a disabled vehicle out of the area. It was a mess from top to bottom.)
Chuck Tryon, Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence: Covers a variety of developments, from new methods of financing films to the effect of digital projection on cinemas (it’s expensive to switch from physical reels, even if it may save money in the long run) and the impact of new dissemination models like Netflix on cinema attendance, and then on to the role of film blogs and film remixes in constituting a film-going and -understanding public. Interesting to see these things taken together, since they’re usually considered separately, but people fond of vidding might need to take a few deep breaths while reading that last chapter on remix. (
cesperanza, I was thinking of sending a few pages to you just to watch you react!) Tryon has read Henry Jenkins, but took from him the idea that vidding is about “tributes” to the original, and he uses trailer mashups and film surveys (like the one where different movies count from 1 to 100) to survey the remix genre. While he takes time to note that somehow in the new developments in creating and financing film it’s the young white guys who get celebrated, and even mentions the gender implications of taking Brokeback Mountain mashup trailers as a focus of one’s analysis of remix culture, he then … continues to focus on Brokeback Mountain mashup trailers, while not spending any time explaining what gets left out. Tryon might point out that his interest is in movies, not television, which is somewhat fair (except … Vogue! The Mountain! Handlebars! Beethoven’s Fifth Gold Digger!). But I was naturally drawn to the question of why he picked movies as compared to other forms of audiovisual production, which was not answered in the book.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.